While advertisers on both ends continue to debate the pros and cons of their favourite medium hotly, it has become fairly evident that digital has not only become a huge part of most advertising strategies but has completely changed the tested fundamentals of marketing.
Traditional marketing, which includes everything from billboards and flyers to TV adverts and radio jingles, has long dominated the world of marketing. All this changed as digital platforms gained an unprecedented user base. The last 5-10 years have seen a huge increase in the number of Internet users.
With smartphones becoming ubiquitous and data connections becoming more affordable, internet usage has shot up even more.
Advertisers always invested in marketing online, but these huge numbers – there are over 460 million Internet users just in India who have changed the way brands approach digital advertising. What was earlier seen as an additional channel is now right at the top of all marketing strategies!
Why Are Digital Platforms So Attractive To Marketers?
To put it simply – it’s cheap, it reaches more people and it’s quantifiable!
You can reach your exact target market and pay only for what you need, unlike traditional methods which rely on blanket coverage and cannot match such detailed targeting of potential clients. The sheer size of the user base and the models used by companies like Google and Facebook have made it affordable for small businesses as well – you can literally advertise your brand to a hundred people for less than a thousand rupees!
Apart from the affordability, the other advantage lies in being able to measure and gather extensive data about the performance of your advertisement and the people who viewed them – something that analytical tools are making really easy to do.
How Can You Leverage This New Opportunity?
The digital marketing space is vast – from social media and content marketing to online paid advertising and blogging – there are dozens of career paths out there which can be followed on a global scale (unlike usual marketing jobs your physical location is not a constraint in pursuing lucrative opportunities internationally).
But to leverage these new prospects, you need new skills and where better to find digital skills that in the digital world. When it comes to digital marketing, eLearning portals, hands down, offer the very best courses. Many educational-technology firms offer the best of course content combined with their pioneering digital platform to deliver high quality and certified courses to their students – all of which is easily accessible from their homes or offices or on their mobile devices.
The World Wide Web is a vast unexplored space – new technologies are emerging every day and innovation is the name of the game! A simple idea can become the next big trend – all you need are the right foundational skills to get started. So, go ahead and boldly explore the new frontiers of the virtual world.